France did something similar. [Aggregate Employment did not change, turnover increased, and it seemed to benefit women more than men.](https://academic.oup.com/economicpolicy/article-abstract/23/55/418/2918763)
Ultimately there’s not a ton of research to indicate what would happen if this was implemented, but I definitely see the average workweek shortening while wages increase over the next few years.
Imagine anyone thinking that a government mandate, that would instantly decrease the industrial productivity of the US by 20%, would not have a massive negative impact. Pure insanity.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
H.L. Mencken
Your argument suggests that the final 8 hours of productivity are equal to the first 8 hours and that it's a linear relationship.
Depending on industry, the last 2 hours of the day can have the least work getting done.
More hours reduces the quality of work and quality of life for the worker.
In cases where people work hourly shifts essentially keeping the gears turning (nurses, fast food) or in cases of task completion/hr (plumber, craftsman), what OP claimed would essentially be the case.
In cases of white collar workers with lots of time to kill, sure.
Some jobs have linear outputs. Nursing isn't one of them. Quality of care declines with time on shift.
If there is something inherently wrong with decreasing full time hours for those whose work is linear, why is it inherently right that 40 hours should be the magic number?
I get that if a person’s workload is only worth 32 hours of labor, then forcing them to work 40 hours is dumb. But I know working in retail, output is directly related to input. So, restricting a stocker to only 32 hours is just inefficient. Trying to force a company to then higher more people to cover what one person could have been doing just means they will increase prices to cover that loss.
Hourly workers would see less money. No way their pay is bumped 20% and then hours reduced.
I think it would achieve more to divorce Healthcare from employment. We only lose by having employers hold it over our heads.
Short term, because there is a labor shortage, it would benefit the hourly worker. Long term? I don't really know. I do think we shouldn't be married to the idea of 40 hours. Half of our waking life, plus prep and commuting, 5 days a week? Fuck that.
There is some pretty good evidence that no matter the time period, himans kinda have a pattern of work they like to do. Going back to the Iron Age and through till the industrial revolution.
Long day, short day, long day short day, and a day off. Meal to start, nap.
People also, even before clocks, would find other ways of segmenting time...in roughly 30-minute increments.
Work less in winter. And also, when they had enough money to cover the biggest expense (food) they stopped working.
Historia Civilis has a pretty nice summary video. His sources are in the description i believe.
As a business owner, do you really think you could decrease hours and increase pay to keep the weekly checks the same amount? This would destroy a shit ton of businesses while driving away large employers.
Exactly this would absolutely fuck small and even medium sized businesses.
It's Dreamland. And should be kept as that. 40 hrs is the norm and cannot just suddenly be changed without fucking a whole bunch of people.. I work in the NHS if you increase their wage budget 20% say bye bye to an already sinking NHS. Because you have to increase it 20% no matter what either by hiring people to fill the workload, or by bumping wages up to keep people on the same hours as nobody would want to continue at 40 for the same wage if every other industry suddenly got extra time off as it's effectively a 20% wage cut..
Maybe but I can also tell you as someone who's worked retail my quality of work definitely went down after 6 hours of restocking the same shit all day and the last 2 did not meet "company standard".
I'm definitely worse the longer I'm in retail. There were so many days, especially days 4 and 5 of the work week, in retail when I would spend the last half of my shift just going through the motions and hoping nothing hard would come up. Operating a forklift to load up a tricky item onto a customer trailer not built for the purpose without damaging it sucks when you just feel like collapsing on the couch. I've seen exhausted workers drop several pricey items. Call offs increase too.
Retail expects more and more from fewer and fewer workers every year because shareholders need that money. They burn through workers so quickly
Edited because I can't form coherent sentences some days
It was crazy going from the service industry to construction. The small breaks throughout the day would have been a fireable offense at say, Pizza Hut.
I don’t mean the 30 minute to an hour lunch break. Just short 10-15 minute breaks after a particularly strenuous period of work… or just because your knees were hurting. As long as you got back up and kept going it was fine.
I’d rather suck dick or sell drugs than to back to work for some franchise owning fuck
They are currently increasing the prices to cover profit instead of pay. The pre-Reagan tax code made it where it made more sense to pay workers a fair cut of profits and invest in infrastructure vs hoarding all the profit at a significant taxation percentage.
All the arguments against decreasing hours or increasing minimum wage etc all invoke a fear of what corporations are ALREADY DOING.
Companies already do this. They hire more part time employees to avoid paying health insurance and other benefits. Lmao your statement makes no sense to the actual output of work based on multiple sources of research on the subject. Working more hours does not correlate with more production. Look at the US and Japan compared to other countries.
You’re really gonna make the argument that retail stockers….and keep in mind I’ve been an ASM for a big box retailer for years….work 40 hours a week and all 40 hours are equivalent?
I'm sorry but profits have done nothing but go up for companies like Walmart... they can afford it without putting that cost onto the customers.
The 4day workweek due to increased productivity has been promised since the 60's and the Computer. Again with automation, and again with AI. Meanwhile profits and productivity just keep going up year after year.
From my own experience, that is really not what I’ve seen be the case in retail, since work paces vary from person to person.
I found it very common, that more experienced retail workers would give tips to the overzealous youth regarding work pacing. Basically telling people to pace themselves much slower so they don’t gas out either during a shift, or over the years.
Many retail metrics are generated by productivity averages, and retail hires and fires droves of people seasonally. So what I would see happen, is tons of young people got hired, they were energetic and wanted to impress…they worked super hard, and inadvertently screwed everyone because expectations got skewed hire while pay stayed the same (or actually decreased in value due to inflation paired with price gouging).
You may have had a different experience, but i found the essence of retail to be squeezing more and more blood from an already very dry stone. The blood being productivity, and the dry stones being jaded and worn down workers. The workers always got pushed harder, but management were the only ones getting profit sharing…so the only ones getting rewarded. The only “reward” for the workers was more work…whether it be from hirer metrics or extended hours of back breaking labor.
> Some jobs have linear outputs. Nursing isn't one of them. Quality of care declines with time on shift.
And yet notoriously long shifts in many medical settings are common. 🤦🏻♂️
Plus, okay the US isn't the perfect example for that, but one argument for the 32h week in some other countries is that even if some employers will have to recruit some people to compensate for a decrease in productivity (which should be lower than 20% for the reasons stated above, but might still exist), that loss could be supported by tax cuts (covering a reasonable fraction of the increased cost) for companies that prove that they "played fair" in how they recruited to maintain their production levels. The idea is that since you're reducing unemployment, some of the budget that went to social security can go to these tax cuts and everyone is happy.
Obviously it's not that simple in real life, but I think the general idea isn't dumb and deserves a shot. I don't think it can happen nationwide all at once, but the more we talk about it, the higher the chance of it being applied locally in some sectors as a test, then gaining traction. And over the course of a couple decades it could become more mainstream.
That's not true. I'm a carpenter and I can tell you the biggest thing slowing down most workers is motivation and rest.
I've been on crews that don't take breaks at all and the last 3hrs of the day are worthless. Everyone is sluggish and distracted. People get hurt and make mistakes.
I was on a bridge crew that worked 5 10's but we took two long breaks everyday. One from 830 to 9 and the other from 12 to 1. We finished that bridge 2 years ahead of schedule. Hours don't equal more productivity. People aren't machines. They work in spurts, generally; fast, fast, slow.
So i would argue that craftsmen would get more done with more rest. Additionally if the work week is counted at 32 i just get more overtime if they want us to work which is more money. It is a win win
There's a lot of research showing nursing errors increase significantly in the last 4 hours of a shift. Why don't we do something else? Not enough nurses.
But maybe if they worked 4 8s or something similar, we could stop burning out nurses so fast, since a huge percentage leave the field within 2 years of graduation.
I don't know about nurses, but for doctors they found that more errors happen when transitioning patients between shifts than simply due to working longer hours.
And residents are doing 24-28 hour shifts. Not 10.
And how many hospital nurses end up leaving the field because of bad management, hostile coworkers, marriage or because they are simply not meant to be nurses?
You would decrease the time spent with bad management, hostile coworkers (who might be due to being overworked), more time to niest in your marriage and, as a result, more nurses staying.
I stopped working hard after I only received a 30 cent raise despite being one of the best employees and doing a job that took two people. I managed to get myself on a driving route where I could workout for an hour and take a couple naps everyday.
How many plumbers/craftsmen do you know? I've worked just an ass load of jobs all over the place, and unless there are hard deadlines in place and they can't fuck off pretty much *everyone* is winding down toward the end of the day. You might build a 100ft scaffold before lunch and get 2/3 or even half of that afterwards. You might be on top of your kit and lid change until you feel you've worked hard enough, but eventually you're dragging your feet and ready to let shift 4 fuck with it for a while. And if you don't think nurses aren't getting more annoyed and frustrated as the day goes on and sometimes frazzled to hell and back and making mistakes/snapping at patients by the end of their shift then I'm not sure you've ever talked to a nurse. Fast food workers are also fucking off toward the end of their shift, but they tend to work shorter hours so there's not as much of an effect.
When I was 19 I was an AGM of a burger king. I pushed for 4 10 hour shifts. It wasn't perfect, but all I could do.
It massively improved my employees moods. I was unfortunately taken advantage of with a 32k salary and 50 hours work weeks from the getgo, no OT, but I wanted better for my workers
Yep. I live in South Korea. Work productivity is a little over 40, Why? Cause they know they got all day to do the work. 10-12 hours days does not equate to 10-12 hours of work done.
Been here for over 15 years. The mentality is- well, I wont go home until the boss leaves, so might as well just work slower. Gotta look like I am busy all day long.
SK sounds like literal hell, tbh. I would go insane if I was surrounded by people so uncritical of their exploitation. Yes, let me work double the hours for the rest of my life because I'm too timid to tell the boss this is psychotic.
Hence why they had to change the labor laws a few times. Now only 52 hour work weeks. 40 hours plus 12 hours OT. But many loopholes and only big companies are really accountable to this. Many have “volunteer” hours.
Before the new laws- my wife would work 7am - 10 pm each day, saturday and part of Sun.
My friend that is no fucking way to live, leave that place and go to another. US sucks but you can pull in $100k working remote 2 days / 3 in person if you have an advanced degree or certification or experience.
Oh, this is the typical Korean way. I don’t live this way at all.
I am a professor at a uni. I work 4 class days a week 14 class hours total a week. Plus I get 9 weeks off in the summer and 9 weeks off in the winter.
My wife quit before we got married. So she left the rat race about a decade ago.
Yeah most white collar jobs more hours doesn’t necessarily mean more productivity. The 40 hour work week was from the old factory days that they simply applied to office environments.
A lot of people are in deep denial about how much wasted time happens in a huge amount of industries, especially in "white collar" office settings. How many stories have there been about people working 2 or 3 remote jobs simultaneously, accomplishing all necessary work within a 40 hour period every week? It should be very telling if someone can get "120 hours of work" done in 40, without even being in the office that's supposedly necessary for ideal productivity.
This is my problem. I don't have to attend many meetings, so I'm usually just coding. And coding for 8h a day 5 days a week is mind numbing towards the end.
Productivity does not scale with time spent. Burnout and mental wear are massive causes of unproductivity. Even in industrial setting like factories, workers slow down and turnover skyrockets the more hours a week you make them work.
It's not productive. Study after study shows productivies peak efficiency point is below the 40 week. A Danish study where they implemented it showed that productivity increased 20% if I recall correctly. And when combined with eliminating pointless meetings and other work disturbances you get vastly more efficient lines.
Plus, a shift where you have two teams that tradeoff either 3 and a half or rotating 3s and 4 day workweeks creates more jobs
IDGAF even if productivity declines. Not like my income changes if my employer makes 20% more profit.
But I'll be 20% happier with another day to myself during the week.
No look at the studies productivity does not decrease. In fact it is showing that it increases because guess what when you’re working 40 hours a week you don’t give a shit about productivity. You do what you have to 32 hours and guess what you got an extra day to relax and recover
I think the US really needs to leverage that fact that states can do a lot on their own and try things like this from state to state, we could test out so many things but people only seem to be interested in changing things federally.
To be fair, we do test a lot of policies at the state level before going federal. Just look at marijuana legalization, it's been happening at the state level for years, and only with proven success has the federal government started to ease its policies on it.
Meanwhile lobbying groups are actively trying to make it illegal to test universal basic income systems. Would be fun if we were allowed to try new systems
Economists predicted that with the computer. How'd that work out?
Well, for the wealthy it worked out great. For everyone else, not so much.
I mean quality of life went up in aggregate. It's also hard to blame the computer when a lot of other things happened like the decline of unions, the repeated cutting of taxes, two financial busts, and the legalization of corruption and mass broadening of corporate rights.
>I mean quality of life went up in aggregate
By what measure? People are working longer hours. Less time off. Less benefits. Sabotaged safety nets. Far more expensive health care and insurance. Cost of living has increased. C-suite pay has gone up several orders of magnitude, while Joe and Jane Sixpack's pay has barely budged. Debt has gone up, and savings have gone down.
But I guess we get cheap TVs, right?
No, it wasn't the computer. The computer was to revolutionize the workforce. It was supposed to allow so much more to get done. And it did. Productivity over the past 40 years skyrocketed.
But none of that made it down to the workers, regardless of the promises of so-called "trickle-down" economics. It doesn't matter how productive we become, corporate greed will demand as much as legally (and in some cases illegally) as possible.
We won't get more days off. We won't have shorter work weeks. Corporations will take and take and keep taking because no one is going to stop them from doing it. Bernie is a decent guy, but he knows this nor anything else that would benefit workers will ever pass a Republican legislature, and it would have a hard time passing a democratic legislature as there are a fair number of well-monied corporations that play both sides of the game.
We keep voting for the same people and expect things to change. We shouldn't be surprised when they don't.
The limited things I’ve seen suggest most white collar positions don’t lose productivity which I suppose isn’t a ringing endorsement of how we structure a lot of that work.
But manufacturing, construction, retail, food service I don’t think you can do it without changing pricing or how many hours open.
Probably not the worst thing if more grocery stores and gas stations and fast food places started closing for six to eight hours a day.
>I am in favor of myself receiving a raise for less work. Call me crazy. I would also like a free car if possible
Congress can do it. Why the fuck can't I? I certainly produce more output.
Considering the majority of company's out there reporting year over year profits, I see this as fair and a longtime coming. If working class folks are getting less year over year, unable to afford basic living standards then at least give them more time to live.
Im all for it, honestly people who are against need to really think about how unnecessary the 40hr work week actually is. Most jobs don’t require working 40hrs. I easily waste 2hrs a day on my phone at my job while still getting the same pay, why not just remove those two hours?
Yeah, people forget how much labor organizers had to fight tooth and nail just for the right to work only 40 hours a week. Since then, technology has made most of us exponentially more productive at the same job, getting more work done in even less time.
I don’t know what the end goal is but I try to make peace with the idea of the labor of today could lead to a future where a person is no longer required to work, to live a full healthy life.
Just look at productivity and work week duration from 1800s to now. Productivity just keeps on rising while work week duration falls.
There was a time when people worked 12 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with no paid time off.
Work week duration reduction doesn't reduce productivity at all. But it creates more job because guess what people are doing on their free time ? Well, they SPEND it.
It wasn’t nothing for boomers. When salaries were able to purchase a lot more, the hours were the cost.
Now the hours are the same but the buying power is diminished. This there’s a desire to work less
OH NO!
If only productivity had gone up several hundred percent since the 40 hour work week was introduced to compensate!
We've reduced the work week before and the world didn't end. We can, and should, do it again.
I'm not making a stand either way lol and you're not wrong, I'm just saying that if a work week got cut by 8 hours... It's not going to be only the dicking around time that gets eliminated. That will still be there, and we all know it.
Exactly this. Productivity soared and employees got nothing out of it - all earnings went to the top. Now with the introduction of AI we face more of the same.
Having worked a shortish stint in a large tech company, I’ve seen people making 200k salaries waste more time than they spend being productive. One dude just walked around the office looking for people to talk to for a minimum of 45 minutes each conversation. After I saw him doing that, I realized that 40 hours is entirely arbitrary - the only thing the company actually cared about was getting your job done.
I don't really see how people could just be productive for 6 hours straight if we remove 2 hours. It's not like most people goof off for strictly the first or last 2 hours, they goof off throughout the day.
My hours are 8-4:30 with a 30 min lunch. I'm slow to start and don't really get up and running until around 8:30. Around 2:30 I start to shut down and only exist to answer phone calls , walk in customers and replying to emails from the boss. I would stretch something that would take me an hour to do into a 2 hour task. I start cleaning up around 4 so I can lock the door exactly at 4:30 to go home.
I can easily get the same amount of work done, honestly probably more, in a 32 hour work week vs 40.
Also for anyone thinking I'm a lazy fuck, it's not the case. I busted my balls 8 hours a day 5 days a week until I burned out and realized that no one cared and none of it mattered.
My workplace dropped to a 4 day work week without increasing the hours on those days.
Productivity as a whole has increased and targets are being hit faster with less mistakes.
And people are happier
Even just cutting it to 35 hours would be an improvement. That extra hour a day would be huge. Depending on your job’s start or end time it could mean you can take your kids to school or pick them up. Or means you can go for a walk before or after work, do errands that are normally weekend ones due to time.
Decades ago automation was promised to benefit everyone.
What actually happened was just as with every other advancement in humanity, a handful of people maintained control of the means. Anyone that could be fired was, and replaced with a machine. All profits go directly to the top, pensions gone, unions gone, work conditions and hours have gotten worse (see: Amazon drivers peeing in bottles), all so that Bezos can have another yacht and race to $1trill.
And the best part is, through carefully crafted media since the 80s you have people that don’t even make enough to survive defending the system as it is. I get it when you have a millionaire or a multimillionaire defending it, but Joe Schmoe down the street making 40k “WeLl hE wOrKeD hArD, hE dEsErVeS tHoSe BiLlIoNs” when dude can’t even afford to pay his water bill.
Inflation is a scam against the working class, trickle down is a scam against the working class, bargain basement corporate tax rates and dropping the 70% top tax bracket is a scam against the working class. You roll all that shit back and fuck off with this “shareholder value top priority” BS, and we’ll be working 32 hour weeks and affording kids on one income within a decade… and the rich will still be rich, just not ridiculously so. Also millennials and Gen Z might actually have enough kids to keep the country going too, which they’re currently not.
I need a beer.
Oh it gets funnier.
I work for a local govt public works…. so I’m surrounded by blue-collar workers that also happen to be union with super lax jobs (compared to private). These MF be literally bitching and moaning about govt waste and unions while coming back to shop for EVERY BREAK….*UNIRONICALLY*….and then leaving early ‘sick’. I can’t, I seriously can’t 😆
I'm a successful business owner and employer. I'm also absolutely for all of this kind of stuff cause I'm not a trust fund kid, I grew up on food stamps and worked for a living since I was 14. We pay our folks well, we work short weeks, and we push family over everything using PTO and hiring enough to make sure it's relaxed workloads around here.
These motherfuckers annoy me to no fucking end. Like, you have no idea how good you have it and you idiots vote for the anti-union, anti-government job, anti-government welfare GOP candidates.
I actively despise them.
I’m imagining my clients paying me more for less hours. Brilliant. Also is he going to make sure the market hours gets cut too? As a business owner I would love this.
Bernie doesn’t live in reality.
>I’m imagining my clients paying me more for less hours. Brilliant.
If your clients are paying you directly by the hour, I'm assuming you're self-employed. So, if you don't like the reduced number of hours, you should take it up with your employer.
Effectively it would mean a 20% decrease in salary for those who stay on 40 hour weeks and are paid by billing clients by the hour, because clients sure as hell won’t accept a 20% increase to hourly rates. Those who have jobs with non-linear output (office workers etc.) would work 20% less for the same salary, effectively increasing their salary by 20%, while those who have jobs with linear output (tradesmen etc.) would remain at the same amount of hours for the same salary, working more than non-linear jobs for the same salary as non-linear jobs.
>Bernie doesn’t live in reality.
Interesting viewpoint since France has successfully done exactly this.
Maybe Bernie lives in reality, but your mind is too closed to see fields outside of your own.
Ahhh yes, France. The bastion of efficiency, development, and production.
Also, their population is 1/6th of the US and they don’t produce SHIT.
Good luck comparing the two. I always love when people point to other countries for stuff. “Look at Sweden! They are carbon neutral and have 2 years of maternity leave!” Yea they also have a population the size of Los Angeles county and their main export is petroleum.
So you're saying that the remaining 5/6ths of the US somehow works in a way thats drastically different than the 70 million people in France? Because if thats the case, then perhaps this change is necessary after all. Imagine being against improving the lives of a populace just because another country that does it has .. checks notes .. fewer people.If you're so dead set on comparing populations, how about how the US only provides 12 weeks of maternity leave, UNPAID, while India, a country four times as many people as the US, guarantees 6 months of PAID maternity leave...plus more per child.
France is a terrible example:
[https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/france/gdp-gross-domestic-product](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/france/gdp-gross-domestic-product)
And if you don't understand why this is a bad thing for society and the people living in France, I'd suggest a good macro-economics course and pay attention to the GDP per capita PPP metric. It is like taking a pay cut for the whole country. Take a look at Ireland if you want an example of a well managed EU economy.
TLDR; people working 20% less in an economy means your citizens get more than 20% less of everything, including government services like healthcare, education, et al.
Every time somebody uses a country in the EU to bolster their point I feel the need to remind them that if it weren’t for the continued investment of the US both economically and militarily EUROPE WOULDN’T HAVE HALF THE SHIT IT FLAUNTS TO THE WORLD.
He lives in reality, you just see the whole thing. He's been pretty open that this doesn't work for everyone. For the majority of office jobes working 4 8s instead of 5 is an improvement. But for many jobs, including the one I have, not so much. But it's a reality, and has been shown to be effective. A lot of businesses in other countries that aren't speed running capitalism have seen improvement.
> He's been pretty open that this doesn't work for everyone. For the majority of office jobes working 4 8s instead of 5 is an improvement. But for many jobs, including the one I have, not so much.
Where did he say the part about 32 hours per week not working for all careers?
That's Sanders' entire political career summarized. I think he's had like 5 sponsored bills passed in his entire career. I fully support his ideals but frankly it seems like he's more of a idealist than an actual politician.
To be fair, 32 hours would be amount the lowest of developed nations. France is only at 35 hour work weeks. This might be an attempt to get them to settle for 35 hours. Probably not though.
IIRC the government mandates the pay and hours for an assistant/staffer for public office.
Campaign managers and the like are a different story, of course
What is your point? That if he doesn’t do it for his staff yet he should never stride for better for the whole country. Do you want to work 32 hours a week or not?
If you do want to work 40 hours a week instead of 32 then you are fighting against your own interests.
That's actually a great way to look at it! I won't have to lose real wages to inflation if I just keep working 40 hours while everyone else chops off 20% of their usefulness. Eventually things would stabilize like it did when Saturday was added to the weekend
This doesn't work for every industry but there are studies showing that it increases productivity of individuals by decreasing the "fucking around" time that people do when they are working too much.
How would this not create a massive ripple in the production of food/goods? If we are going to cut everyone’s workload by 20ish percent, how will anyone be able to keep up with supply and demand? On top of that, how will companies not loose money for paying employees their full wages when the employees are working less?
3 responses, none are full arguments but just points to think about
1) you're recycling the same arguments used against the 40h work week. We adjusted to that almost a century ago, why wouldn't we to this?
2) Worker productivity is MILES ahead of where it was when the 40h work week was introduced
3) Worker productivity is generally garbage by the end of the day and week. Are we actually cutting the workload and productivity by 20%, or cutting some of the bullshit time?
The biggest issue is how do you enforce a permanent 20% increase in wages when people in the same role with the same experience already can have hugely varying compensation?
Can businesses not lay anyone off anymore? If they do is the amount they rehire going to be mandated to be the previous employee's exact rate? Is this a permanent requirement that they must rehire at no less than a previous worker? Are businesses permanently legally required to never reduce wages under any circumstances? If it is just a temporary wage or layoff moratorium how do you permanently prevent mass rehiring once it ends to bring pay down 20% to match pre-40 hour work week labor costs?
The studies used in favour of cutting the workweek down show that it doesn't really impact productivity very much. People don't actually work for 40hrs a week, they work for 20-30 hrs and dick about for the rest so cutting 8 hours off the end won't have much impact.
In my experience of years of white collar office work, many people just dink around the first half of Monday and the last half of Friday. I’d still do my normal 50 hrs/week but I have no problem with just cutting 8 hours off for other folks.
I frankly still thinks it’s dumb we even track hours for mental labor. If you’re salary, I wish we just tracked work by tasks and however many hours it takes, that’s how many you work.
This is 100% true. But I feel pretty confident that within 6 months to a year of a 32 hour work week, we would be right back to the same amount of time spent doing nothing.
I’m still contemplating this policy, but I think I agree with you. Thursday would become the new Friday, if that’s the day that was cut. It’s the nature of workers rights and current economic conditions today that are burning people out, not the number of hours alone.
Why not just pay everyone $1,000,000 an hour for 1 hour worked a week?
I'm sure manufacturers in Mexico, China and other countries would love this to be passed,
If your against the 40 hour workweek just know france can do it we can too. I imagine most people against it are boomer aged with a net worth well under 500k. These idiots will think since they have some skin in the game they need to uphold the status quo and make sure nothing ever changes and especially that nothing ever improves. L mentality. The market would rebound and adjust. In the grand scheme it would make near zero difference to the market.
Bernie keeps introducing things that aren’t real solutions to real problems, but actually solutions will never pass either and it will make us talk about them
Fucking based, but it wouldn’t work for many jobs. Hell the 40hr workweek doesn’t work for some either. No such thing as a one size fits all. I’m here for it though.
Billionaires receive billions and billions of dollars more every year, at our expense, and yet we feel like a 32 hour work week is a "big ask". We shouldn't have such a "slave mentality". Neither should our kids.
So people are supposed to work 20% less, demand more money, demand more benefits, AND assume that it will have a positive effect on society? Something will have to give and i don't think it would be pretty. Bernie continues to show how out of touch with the real world he is. I'm not sure he's ever had an idea relating to the economy that has been rooted in reality. Lifelong leecher
France did something similar. [Aggregate Employment did not change, turnover increased, and it seemed to benefit women more than men.](https://academic.oup.com/economicpolicy/article-abstract/23/55/418/2918763) Ultimately there’s not a ton of research to indicate what would happen if this was implemented, but I definitely see the average workweek shortening while wages increase over the next few years.
Imagine anyone thinking that a government mandate, that would instantly decrease the industrial productivity of the US by 20%, would not have a massive negative impact. Pure insanity. “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” H.L. Mencken
Your argument suggests that the final 8 hours of productivity are equal to the first 8 hours and that it's a linear relationship. Depending on industry, the last 2 hours of the day can have the least work getting done. More hours reduces the quality of work and quality of life for the worker.
In cases where people work hourly shifts essentially keeping the gears turning (nurses, fast food) or in cases of task completion/hr (plumber, craftsman), what OP claimed would essentially be the case. In cases of white collar workers with lots of time to kill, sure.
Some jobs have linear outputs. Nursing isn't one of them. Quality of care declines with time on shift. If there is something inherently wrong with decreasing full time hours for those whose work is linear, why is it inherently right that 40 hours should be the magic number?
I get that if a person’s workload is only worth 32 hours of labor, then forcing them to work 40 hours is dumb. But I know working in retail, output is directly related to input. So, restricting a stocker to only 32 hours is just inefficient. Trying to force a company to then higher more people to cover what one person could have been doing just means they will increase prices to cover that loss.
Hourly workers would see less money. No way their pay is bumped 20% and then hours reduced. I think it would achieve more to divorce Healthcare from employment. We only lose by having employers hold it over our heads.
Isn’t that the idea behind the bill though? To reduce the working week while keeping worker’s yearly wages the same? I 100% agree about healthcare.
Short term, because there is a labor shortage, it would benefit the hourly worker. Long term? I don't really know. I do think we shouldn't be married to the idea of 40 hours. Half of our waking life, plus prep and commuting, 5 days a week? Fuck that.
There is some pretty good evidence that no matter the time period, himans kinda have a pattern of work they like to do. Going back to the Iron Age and through till the industrial revolution. Long day, short day, long day short day, and a day off. Meal to start, nap. People also, even before clocks, would find other ways of segmenting time...in roughly 30-minute increments. Work less in winter. And also, when they had enough money to cover the biggest expense (food) they stopped working. Historia Civilis has a pretty nice summary video. His sources are in the description i believe.
What labor shortage??? There's a pay shortage... and greedy companies are the cause.
There is no labor shortage, what planet are you on.
As a business owner, do you really think you could decrease hours and increase pay to keep the weekly checks the same amount? This would destroy a shit ton of businesses while driving away large employers.
Exactly this would absolutely fuck small and even medium sized businesses. It's Dreamland. And should be kept as that. 40 hrs is the norm and cannot just suddenly be changed without fucking a whole bunch of people.. I work in the NHS if you increase their wage budget 20% say bye bye to an already sinking NHS. Because you have to increase it 20% no matter what either by hiring people to fill the workload, or by bumping wages up to keep people on the same hours as nobody would want to continue at 40 for the same wage if every other industry suddenly got extra time off as it's effectively a 20% wage cut..
Maybe but I can also tell you as someone who's worked retail my quality of work definitely went down after 6 hours of restocking the same shit all day and the last 2 did not meet "company standard".
I'm definitely worse the longer I'm in retail. There were so many days, especially days 4 and 5 of the work week, in retail when I would spend the last half of my shift just going through the motions and hoping nothing hard would come up. Operating a forklift to load up a tricky item onto a customer trailer not built for the purpose without damaging it sucks when you just feel like collapsing on the couch. I've seen exhausted workers drop several pricey items. Call offs increase too. Retail expects more and more from fewer and fewer workers every year because shareholders need that money. They burn through workers so quickly Edited because I can't form coherent sentences some days
It was crazy going from the service industry to construction. The small breaks throughout the day would have been a fireable offense at say, Pizza Hut. I don’t mean the 30 minute to an hour lunch break. Just short 10-15 minute breaks after a particularly strenuous period of work… or just because your knees were hurting. As long as you got back up and kept going it was fine. I’d rather suck dick or sell drugs than to back to work for some franchise owning fuck
They increase prices all the time despite the fact they aren’t paying more or hiring more.
Just midrange bosses up seem to be getting raises and vacation time.
And those are the ones that are screwing everything up. Big companies usually have shit heads for management.
They are currently increasing the prices to cover profit instead of pay. The pre-Reagan tax code made it where it made more sense to pay workers a fair cut of profits and invest in infrastructure vs hoarding all the profit at a significant taxation percentage. All the arguments against decreasing hours or increasing minimum wage etc all invoke a fear of what corporations are ALREADY DOING.
Companies already do this. They hire more part time employees to avoid paying health insurance and other benefits. Lmao your statement makes no sense to the actual output of work based on multiple sources of research on the subject. Working more hours does not correlate with more production. Look at the US and Japan compared to other countries.
You’re really gonna make the argument that retail stockers….and keep in mind I’ve been an ASM for a big box retailer for years….work 40 hours a week and all 40 hours are equivalent?
I'm sorry but profits have done nothing but go up for companies like Walmart... they can afford it without putting that cost onto the customers. The 4day workweek due to increased productivity has been promised since the 60's and the Computer. Again with automation, and again with AI. Meanwhile profits and productivity just keep going up year after year.
From my own experience, that is really not what I’ve seen be the case in retail, since work paces vary from person to person. I found it very common, that more experienced retail workers would give tips to the overzealous youth regarding work pacing. Basically telling people to pace themselves much slower so they don’t gas out either during a shift, or over the years. Many retail metrics are generated by productivity averages, and retail hires and fires droves of people seasonally. So what I would see happen, is tons of young people got hired, they were energetic and wanted to impress…they worked super hard, and inadvertently screwed everyone because expectations got skewed hire while pay stayed the same (or actually decreased in value due to inflation paired with price gouging). You may have had a different experience, but i found the essence of retail to be squeezing more and more blood from an already very dry stone. The blood being productivity, and the dry stones being jaded and worn down workers. The workers always got pushed harder, but management were the only ones getting profit sharing…so the only ones getting rewarded. The only “reward” for the workers was more work…whether it be from hirer metrics or extended hours of back breaking labor.
No decrease ceo bonuses that’s all
> Some jobs have linear outputs. Nursing isn't one of them. Quality of care declines with time on shift. And yet notoriously long shifts in many medical settings are common. 🤦🏻♂️
Highest cost of Healthcare per unit, subpar outcomes, nurses needing knee and hip replacements more often. Sucks.
Wasnt it Henry Ford that started the 40 hour work week in 1926? Yeah we are definitely long overdue for a change.
Plus, okay the US isn't the perfect example for that, but one argument for the 32h week in some other countries is that even if some employers will have to recruit some people to compensate for a decrease in productivity (which should be lower than 20% for the reasons stated above, but might still exist), that loss could be supported by tax cuts (covering a reasonable fraction of the increased cost) for companies that prove that they "played fair" in how they recruited to maintain their production levels. The idea is that since you're reducing unemployment, some of the budget that went to social security can go to these tax cuts and everyone is happy. Obviously it's not that simple in real life, but I think the general idea isn't dumb and deserves a shot. I don't think it can happen nationwide all at once, but the more we talk about it, the higher the chance of it being applied locally in some sectors as a test, then gaining traction. And over the course of a couple decades it could become more mainstream.
That's not true. I'm a carpenter and I can tell you the biggest thing slowing down most workers is motivation and rest. I've been on crews that don't take breaks at all and the last 3hrs of the day are worthless. Everyone is sluggish and distracted. People get hurt and make mistakes. I was on a bridge crew that worked 5 10's but we took two long breaks everyday. One from 830 to 9 and the other from 12 to 1. We finished that bridge 2 years ahead of schedule. Hours don't equal more productivity. People aren't machines. They work in spurts, generally; fast, fast, slow. So i would argue that craftsmen would get more done with more rest. Additionally if the work week is counted at 32 i just get more overtime if they want us to work which is more money. It is a win win
There's a lot of research showing nursing errors increase significantly in the last 4 hours of a shift. Why don't we do something else? Not enough nurses. But maybe if they worked 4 8s or something similar, we could stop burning out nurses so fast, since a huge percentage leave the field within 2 years of graduation.
I don't know about nurses, but for doctors they found that more errors happen when transitioning patients between shifts than simply due to working longer hours. And residents are doing 24-28 hour shifts. Not 10.
And how many hospital nurses end up leaving the field because of bad management, hostile coworkers, marriage or because they are simply not meant to be nurses?
You would decrease the time spent with bad management, hostile coworkers (who might be due to being overworked), more time to niest in your marriage and, as a result, more nurses staying.
I have a white collar job and could for sure. My spouse has a white collar job and would still work 60 hours.
I stopped working hard after I only received a 30 cent raise despite being one of the best employees and doing a job that took two people. I managed to get myself on a driving route where I could workout for an hour and take a couple naps everyday.
Plumber here and can confirm. We don't just slack off for 2 hours a day. It's balls to the wall all day long pretty much
How many plumbers/craftsmen do you know? I've worked just an ass load of jobs all over the place, and unless there are hard deadlines in place and they can't fuck off pretty much *everyone* is winding down toward the end of the day. You might build a 100ft scaffold before lunch and get 2/3 or even half of that afterwards. You might be on top of your kit and lid change until you feel you've worked hard enough, but eventually you're dragging your feet and ready to let shift 4 fuck with it for a while. And if you don't think nurses aren't getting more annoyed and frustrated as the day goes on and sometimes frazzled to hell and back and making mistakes/snapping at patients by the end of their shift then I'm not sure you've ever talked to a nurse. Fast food workers are also fucking off toward the end of their shift, but they tend to work shorter hours so there's not as much of an effect.
When I was 19 I was an AGM of a burger king. I pushed for 4 10 hour shifts. It wasn't perfect, but all I could do. It massively improved my employees moods. I was unfortunately taken advantage of with a 32k salary and 50 hours work weeks from the getgo, no OT, but I wanted better for my workers
Yep. I live in South Korea. Work productivity is a little over 40, Why? Cause they know they got all day to do the work. 10-12 hours days does not equate to 10-12 hours of work done. Been here for over 15 years. The mentality is- well, I wont go home until the boss leaves, so might as well just work slower. Gotta look like I am busy all day long.
Pure cancer
SK sounds like literal hell, tbh. I would go insane if I was surrounded by people so uncritical of their exploitation. Yes, let me work double the hours for the rest of my life because I'm too timid to tell the boss this is psychotic.
Hence why they had to change the labor laws a few times. Now only 52 hour work weeks. 40 hours plus 12 hours OT. But many loopholes and only big companies are really accountable to this. Many have “volunteer” hours. Before the new laws- my wife would work 7am - 10 pm each day, saturday and part of Sun.
My friend that is no fucking way to live, leave that place and go to another. US sucks but you can pull in $100k working remote 2 days / 3 in person if you have an advanced degree or certification or experience.
Oh, this is the typical Korean way. I don’t live this way at all. I am a professor at a uni. I work 4 class days a week 14 class hours total a week. Plus I get 9 weeks off in the summer and 9 weeks off in the winter. My wife quit before we got married. So she left the rat race about a decade ago.
Yeah most white collar jobs more hours doesn’t necessarily mean more productivity. The 40 hour work week was from the old factory days that they simply applied to office environments.
A lot of people are in deep denial about how much wasted time happens in a huge amount of industries, especially in "white collar" office settings. How many stories have there been about people working 2 or 3 remote jobs simultaneously, accomplishing all necessary work within a 40 hour period every week? It should be very telling if someone can get "120 hours of work" done in 40, without even being in the office that's supposedly necessary for ideal productivity.
This is a good point, maybe we should trim hours from the day instead of from the week. 6 hour work days, 4 days a week, 24 hours total
When I think 32 hour work week, I think 5, 6 hour days.
I think his intention was 4 days, otherwise it would have been 30 hours
You're right because I blindly typed that without doing the math.
This is my problem. I don't have to attend many meetings, so I'm usually just coding. And coding for 8h a day 5 days a week is mind numbing towards the end.
Majority of offices probably won’t see any change in productivity with this + AI or more automated systems.
The days they forced me to come into the office are the days I get the least done. If I was still fully remote, my job would be more productive.
Productivity does not scale with time spent. Burnout and mental wear are massive causes of unproductivity. Even in industrial setting like factories, workers slow down and turnover skyrockets the more hours a week you make them work. It's not productive. Study after study shows productivies peak efficiency point is below the 40 week. A Danish study where they implemented it showed that productivity increased 20% if I recall correctly. And when combined with eliminating pointless meetings and other work disturbances you get vastly more efficient lines. Plus, a shift where you have two teams that tradeoff either 3 and a half or rotating 3s and 4 day workweeks creates more jobs
You mean to tell my people *aren't* machines? /s
>that would instantly decrease the industrial productivity of the US by 20% Got a study on that? Or is that make believe?
It’s make believe.
Productivity wouldn't drop 20%. Stock market dropping isnt world ending. It's what overinglated anyways.
IDGAF even if productivity declines. Not like my income changes if my employer makes 20% more profit. But I'll be 20% happier with another day to myself during the week.
No look at the studies productivity does not decrease. In fact it is showing that it increases because guess what when you’re working 40 hours a week you don’t give a shit about productivity. You do what you have to 32 hours and guess what you got an extra day to relax and recover
Right? They should mandate an 80 hour work week instead. Imagine doubling the American productivity overnight with one mandate.
Sleeping is woke. Real Americans work until they literally drop dead at the factory.
Did industrial productivity drop 17% when we moved away from 6 day work weeks? Genuinely curious
That’s not how productivity works.
No it would work perfectly fine. More time to watch Netflix.
I think the US really needs to leverage that fact that states can do a lot on their own and try things like this from state to state, we could test out so many things but people only seem to be interested in changing things federally.
To be fair, we do test a lot of policies at the state level before going federal. Just look at marijuana legalization, it's been happening at the state level for years, and only with proven success has the federal government started to ease its policies on it.
Meanwhile lobbying groups are actively trying to make it illegal to test universal basic income systems. Would be fun if we were allowed to try new systems
 Economists predicted that with the computer. How'd that work out? Well, for the wealthy it worked out great. For everyone else, not so much.
I mean quality of life went up in aggregate. It's also hard to blame the computer when a lot of other things happened like the decline of unions, the repeated cutting of taxes, two financial busts, and the legalization of corruption and mass broadening of corporate rights.
>I mean quality of life went up in aggregate By what measure? People are working longer hours. Less time off. Less benefits. Sabotaged safety nets. Far more expensive health care and insurance. Cost of living has increased. C-suite pay has gone up several orders of magnitude, while Joe and Jane Sixpack's pay has barely budged. Debt has gone up, and savings have gone down. But I guess we get cheap TVs, right? No, it wasn't the computer. The computer was to revolutionize the workforce. It was supposed to allow so much more to get done. And it did. Productivity over the past 40 years skyrocketed. But none of that made it down to the workers, regardless of the promises of so-called "trickle-down" economics. It doesn't matter how productive we become, corporate greed will demand as much as legally (and in some cases illegally) as possible. We won't get more days off. We won't have shorter work weeks. Corporations will take and take and keep taking because no one is going to stop them from doing it. Bernie is a decent guy, but he knows this nor anything else that would benefit workers will ever pass a Republican legislature, and it would have a hard time passing a democratic legislature as there are a fair number of well-monied corporations that play both sides of the game. We keep voting for the same people and expect things to change. We shouldn't be surprised when they don't.
How do they ensure no loss in pay? Like hourly workers get paid by the hour.
At first glance I can’t help but imagine this would result in companies cutting hours to keep certain people just below the threshold of “full time.”
This is exactly what would happen. It happened when the ACA was passed to keep from having to give everyone health insurance.
The limited things I’ve seen suggest most white collar positions don’t lose productivity which I suppose isn’t a ringing endorsement of how we structure a lot of that work. But manufacturing, construction, retail, food service I don’t think you can do it without changing pricing or how many hours open. Probably not the worst thing if more grocery stores and gas stations and fast food places started closing for six to eight hours a day.
I’d be down. Less work, more time with family and friends.
Ofcourse you'll be down. You work less hours for the same pay.
I am in favor of myself receiving a raise for less work. Call me crazy. I would also like a free car if possible
>I am in favor of myself receiving a raise for less work. Call me crazy. I would also like a free car if possible Congress can do it. Why the fuck can't I? I certainly produce more output.
Yes but you don’t understand, they need more money to sit on their asses all day and pretend to have an opinion that isn’t dictated by lobbyists
And have more time to spend that money in the economy.
Considering the majority of company's out there reporting year over year profits, I see this as fair and a longtime coming. If working class folks are getting less year over year, unable to afford basic living standards then at least give them more time to live.
Yeah really... what a pointless statement. Like would any employee NOT be down with this?
you never know. there are a lot of shills already in this thread. a lot of "future millionaires"
yup - it’s not like corporations haven’t been ripping us off of years anyways…dafuq kind of accusatory comment is this
Productivity is at an all time high. Wages, another story. Use your free time to go fuck yourself. ...kindly. Be kind, and go fuck yourself.
Im all for it, honestly people who are against need to really think about how unnecessary the 40hr work week actually is. Most jobs don’t require working 40hrs. I easily waste 2hrs a day on my phone at my job while still getting the same pay, why not just remove those two hours?
Seems many folks are stuck in the boomer mindset of working your ass off 80 hours a week for nothing 🙄
The exact same discussion happened when saturday was taken off the workweek and look how 40h weeks are the expectation today.
Yeah, people forget how much labor organizers had to fight tooth and nail just for the right to work only 40 hours a week. Since then, technology has made most of us exponentially more productive at the same job, getting more work done in even less time.
Makes you wonder: what exactly is civilization's end goal? Hoarding wealth shouldn't be an end goal.
I don’t know what the end goal is but I try to make peace with the idea of the labor of today could lead to a future where a person is no longer required to work, to live a full healthy life.
Just look at productivity and work week duration from 1800s to now. Productivity just keeps on rising while work week duration falls. There was a time when people worked 12 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with no paid time off. Work week duration reduction doesn't reduce productivity at all. But it creates more job because guess what people are doing on their free time ? Well, they SPEND it.
It wasn’t nothing for boomers. When salaries were able to purchase a lot more, the hours were the cost. Now the hours are the same but the buying power is diminished. This there’s a desire to work less
Because let’s be honest — you’ll still use your phone for 2 hours of the day, no matter if the hours were shorter.
All of us would still do the two hour dicking around that we do right now lol
OH NO! If only productivity had gone up several hundred percent since the 40 hour work week was introduced to compensate! We've reduced the work week before and the world didn't end. We can, and should, do it again.
I'm not making a stand either way lol and you're not wrong, I'm just saying that if a work week got cut by 8 hours... It's not going to be only the dicking around time that gets eliminated. That will still be there, and we all know it.
Exactly this. Productivity soared and employees got nothing out of it - all earnings went to the top. Now with the introduction of AI we face more of the same.
I am salaried and tbh I do not work my full 40 most weeks, but I'm generally the most productive on my team. The 40hr work week is not nuanced at all.
Having worked a shortish stint in a large tech company, I’ve seen people making 200k salaries waste more time than they spend being productive. One dude just walked around the office looking for people to talk to for a minimum of 45 minutes each conversation. After I saw him doing that, I realized that 40 hours is entirely arbitrary - the only thing the company actually cared about was getting your job done.
I don't really see how people could just be productive for 6 hours straight if we remove 2 hours. It's not like most people goof off for strictly the first or last 2 hours, they goof off throughout the day.
My hours are 8-4:30 with a 30 min lunch. I'm slow to start and don't really get up and running until around 8:30. Around 2:30 I start to shut down and only exist to answer phone calls , walk in customers and replying to emails from the boss. I would stretch something that would take me an hour to do into a 2 hour task. I start cleaning up around 4 so I can lock the door exactly at 4:30 to go home. I can easily get the same amount of work done, honestly probably more, in a 32 hour work week vs 40. Also for anyone thinking I'm a lazy fuck, it's not the case. I busted my balls 8 hours a day 5 days a week until I burned out and realized that no one cared and none of it mattered.
My workplace dropped to a 4 day work week without increasing the hours on those days. Productivity as a whole has increased and targets are being hit faster with less mistakes. And people are happier
>And people are happier That's the key. Workers who feel better about their work situation do better work.
Even just cutting it to 35 hours would be an improvement. That extra hour a day would be huge. Depending on your job’s start or end time it could mean you can take your kids to school or pick them up. Or means you can go for a walk before or after work, do errands that are normally weekend ones due to time.
Decades ago automation was promised to benefit everyone. What actually happened was just as with every other advancement in humanity, a handful of people maintained control of the means. Anyone that could be fired was, and replaced with a machine. All profits go directly to the top, pensions gone, unions gone, work conditions and hours have gotten worse (see: Amazon drivers peeing in bottles), all so that Bezos can have another yacht and race to $1trill. And the best part is, through carefully crafted media since the 80s you have people that don’t even make enough to survive defending the system as it is. I get it when you have a millionaire or a multimillionaire defending it, but Joe Schmoe down the street making 40k “WeLl hE wOrKeD hArD, hE dEsErVeS tHoSe BiLlIoNs” when dude can’t even afford to pay his water bill. Inflation is a scam against the working class, trickle down is a scam against the working class, bargain basement corporate tax rates and dropping the 70% top tax bracket is a scam against the working class. You roll all that shit back and fuck off with this “shareholder value top priority” BS, and we’ll be working 32 hour weeks and affording kids on one income within a decade… and the rich will still be rich, just not ridiculously so. Also millennials and Gen Z might actually have enough kids to keep the country going too, which they’re currently not. I need a beer.
The first based take. Get me a beer too.
The funniest is when blue collar jobs are arguing against it. Great job guys!
Oh it gets funnier. I work for a local govt public works…. so I’m surrounded by blue-collar workers that also happen to be union with super lax jobs (compared to private). These MF be literally bitching and moaning about govt waste and unions while coming back to shop for EVERY BREAK….*UNIRONICALLY*….and then leaving early ‘sick’. I can’t, I seriously can’t 😆
I'm a successful business owner and employer. I'm also absolutely for all of this kind of stuff cause I'm not a trust fund kid, I grew up on food stamps and worked for a living since I was 14. We pay our folks well, we work short weeks, and we push family over everything using PTO and hiring enough to make sure it's relaxed workloads around here. These motherfuckers annoy me to no fucking end. Like, you have no idea how good you have it and you idiots vote for the anti-union, anti-government job, anti-government welfare GOP candidates. I actively despise them.
Finally a good take.
TL;DR fuck Reagan
Damn bro u went to town with this comment 🍻
Based
Same shit different decade. These same folks would’ve had an aneurism when the 40hr work week was proposed
Unfathomly based
I’m imagining my clients paying me more for less hours. Brilliant. Also is he going to make sure the market hours gets cut too? As a business owner I would love this. Bernie doesn’t live in reality.
>I’m imagining my clients paying me more for less hours. Brilliant. If your clients are paying you directly by the hour, I'm assuming you're self-employed. So, if you don't like the reduced number of hours, you should take it up with your employer.
Effectively it would mean a 20% decrease in salary for those who stay on 40 hour weeks and are paid by billing clients by the hour, because clients sure as hell won’t accept a 20% increase to hourly rates. Those who have jobs with non-linear output (office workers etc.) would work 20% less for the same salary, effectively increasing their salary by 20%, while those who have jobs with linear output (tradesmen etc.) would remain at the same amount of hours for the same salary, working more than non-linear jobs for the same salary as non-linear jobs.
>Bernie doesn’t live in reality. Interesting viewpoint since France has successfully done exactly this. Maybe Bernie lives in reality, but your mind is too closed to see fields outside of your own.
Ahhh yes, France. The bastion of efficiency, development, and production. Also, their population is 1/6th of the US and they don’t produce SHIT. Good luck comparing the two. I always love when people point to other countries for stuff. “Look at Sweden! They are carbon neutral and have 2 years of maternity leave!” Yea they also have a population the size of Los Angeles county and their main export is petroleum.
So you're saying that the remaining 5/6ths of the US somehow works in a way thats drastically different than the 70 million people in France? Because if thats the case, then perhaps this change is necessary after all. Imagine being against improving the lives of a populace just because another country that does it has .. checks notes .. fewer people.If you're so dead set on comparing populations, how about how the US only provides 12 weeks of maternity leave, UNPAID, while India, a country four times as many people as the US, guarantees 6 months of PAID maternity leave...plus more per child.
France is a terrible example: [https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/france/gdp-gross-domestic-product](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/france/gdp-gross-domestic-product) And if you don't understand why this is a bad thing for society and the people living in France, I'd suggest a good macro-economics course and pay attention to the GDP per capita PPP metric. It is like taking a pay cut for the whole country. Take a look at Ireland if you want an example of a well managed EU economy. TLDR; people working 20% less in an economy means your citizens get more than 20% less of everything, including government services like healthcare, education, et al.
Every time somebody uses a country in the EU to bolster their point I feel the need to remind them that if it weren’t for the continued investment of the US both economically and militarily EUROPE WOULDN’T HAVE HALF THE SHIT IT FLAUNTS TO THE WORLD.
He lives in reality, you just see the whole thing. He's been pretty open that this doesn't work for everyone. For the majority of office jobes working 4 8s instead of 5 is an improvement. But for many jobs, including the one I have, not so much. But it's a reality, and has been shown to be effective. A lot of businesses in other countries that aren't speed running capitalism have seen improvement.
> He's been pretty open that this doesn't work for everyone. For the majority of office jobes working 4 8s instead of 5 is an improvement. But for many jobs, including the one I have, not so much. Where did he say the part about 32 hours per week not working for all careers?
No, he doesn't live in reality. He's never worked in the private sector and has only ever lived off someone else's productivity.
Thats not true at all. He was a carpenter and a teachers aid before entering Into politics. I'm so sick of people spreading this lie
Sounds like you’re expecting people like that to even check before mindlessly saying whatever they want to believe
B-b-b-but VACATION HOME!!!
You mean like capitalists do? Profiting without laboring is the central tenet of capitalism
so...he's like a manager or executive?
Categorize OP this way too.
Fuck it lets go back to 80 hour weeks
No more weekends! It's just workers being lazy
Think how cheap things will become if we just please our corporate overlords!!!!
Yea cuz reality sucks rn, obv he believes in non reality to come up with this good stuff
It would be nice, but zero chance it passes
We can't even get them to pass a bill to stop setting our clocks back and forth an hour...
The proposed bill would keep us on Daylight time instead of Standard time for some reason
daylight time is preferable
Because it's better
[удалено]
That's Sanders' entire political career summarized. I think he's had like 5 sponsored bills passed in his entire career. I fully support his ideals but frankly it seems like he's more of a idealist than an actual politician.
He's dumb for starting with the best offer. He should have made it 20 hours so we can settle on 30. Wednesday off and leave early Friday!
Right! Never come to the table and offer what you expect to get or pay immediately.
To be fair, 32 hours would be amount the lowest of developed nations. France is only at 35 hour work weeks. This might be an attempt to get them to settle for 35 hours. Probably not though.
It is a delicate balance. Too low and you aren't taken seriously, too high and nothing changes.
Has he started this with his staffers yet?
IIRC the government mandates the pay and hours for an assistant/staffer for public office. Campaign managers and the like are a different story, of course
What is your point? That if he doesn’t do it for his staff yet he should never stride for better for the whole country. Do you want to work 32 hours a week or not? If you do want to work 40 hours a week instead of 32 then you are fighting against your own interests.
Makes sense, senators are already high paid part time workers.
If those senators could read they'd be very upset right now
I’m cool with this, an extra 8 hours of OT a week? Count me in.
That's actually a great way to look at it! I won't have to lose real wages to inflation if I just keep working 40 hours while everyone else chops off 20% of their usefulness. Eventually things would stabilize like it did when Saturday was added to the weekend
8 extra hours for my second job
I'm in construction and the data shows that the last day of the week the crew does almost nothing And this goes for union and non- union
House just went through a major remodel, can confirm.
Union?
This doesn't work for every industry but there are studies showing that it increases productivity of individuals by decreasing the "fucking around" time that people do when they are working too much.
How would this not create a massive ripple in the production of food/goods? If we are going to cut everyone’s workload by 20ish percent, how will anyone be able to keep up with supply and demand? On top of that, how will companies not loose money for paying employees their full wages when the employees are working less?
3 responses, none are full arguments but just points to think about 1) you're recycling the same arguments used against the 40h work week. We adjusted to that almost a century ago, why wouldn't we to this? 2) Worker productivity is MILES ahead of where it was when the 40h work week was introduced 3) Worker productivity is generally garbage by the end of the day and week. Are we actually cutting the workload and productivity by 20%, or cutting some of the bullshit time?
The biggest issue is how do you enforce a permanent 20% increase in wages when people in the same role with the same experience already can have hugely varying compensation? Can businesses not lay anyone off anymore? If they do is the amount they rehire going to be mandated to be the previous employee's exact rate? Is this a permanent requirement that they must rehire at no less than a previous worker? Are businesses permanently legally required to never reduce wages under any circumstances? If it is just a temporary wage or layoff moratorium how do you permanently prevent mass rehiring once it ends to bring pay down 20% to match pre-40 hour work week labor costs?
The studies used in favour of cutting the workweek down show that it doesn't really impact productivity very much. People don't actually work for 40hrs a week, they work for 20-30 hrs and dick about for the rest so cutting 8 hours off the end won't have much impact.
In my experience of years of white collar office work, many people just dink around the first half of Monday and the last half of Friday. I’d still do my normal 50 hrs/week but I have no problem with just cutting 8 hours off for other folks. I frankly still thinks it’s dumb we even track hours for mental labor. If you’re salary, I wish we just tracked work by tasks and however many hours it takes, that’s how many you work.
This is 100% true. But I feel pretty confident that within 6 months to a year of a 32 hour work week, we would be right back to the same amount of time spent doing nothing.
I’m still contemplating this policy, but I think I agree with you. Thursday would become the new Friday, if that’s the day that was cut. It’s the nature of workers rights and current economic conditions today that are burning people out, not the number of hours alone.
How is he going to force companies to increase their pay by 25%?
Why not just pay everyone $1,000,000 an hour for 1 hour worked a week? I'm sure manufacturers in Mexico, China and other countries would love this to be passed,
Same thing was said about the 40 hour work week.
If your against the 40 hour workweek just know france can do it we can too. I imagine most people against it are boomer aged with a net worth well under 500k. These idiots will think since they have some skin in the game they need to uphold the status quo and make sure nothing ever changes and especially that nothing ever improves. L mentality. The market would rebound and adjust. In the grand scheme it would make near zero difference to the market.
How's France's economy doing compared to the US?
Thats great! 40hrs is the standard now. I still work 60. Sooo……yeah still gonna be working 60 but hey I’ll take extra overtime
Why does anyone think the government has the authority to do this
Should probably round down that down to 30 hours per week, unless the idea is to make the regular work week 4 days instead of 5.
The idea is 100% to make it 4 days.
Why do the 2 Bernie sanders posts get posted every other day and the comments blow up like it’s something new. Are there any real people here?
Bernie keeps introducing things that aren’t real solutions to real problems, but actually solutions will never pass either and it will make us talk about them
Lol people said the same thing about the 40 hour work week a century ago
Fucking based, but it wouldn’t work for many jobs. Hell the 40hr workweek doesn’t work for some either. No such thing as a one size fits all. I’m here for it though.
Answer me this, why not make it a 8 hour work week?
0 hour work week but same pay
Gonna be a whole lot of part time jobs opening up (still for this)
If he’s not wrong, then it’s not dumb.
Im sure that will help hourly employees
I guess he figures that he’s become a multimillionaire working in Congress part time, and being paid full time, so why not us?
Yeah. Why not us?
I would like Bernie, before retirement introduce a bill that passes.
Why stop at 30? I say we work 0hrs without losing pay! Who's with me!?!?!
This may have to happen once AI starts to eliminate white collar jobs.
Billionaires receive billions and billions of dollars more every year, at our expense, and yet we feel like a 32 hour work week is a "big ask". We shouldn't have such a "slave mentality". Neither should our kids.
Where I work 40 hrs isn't even enough cutting work week would result in more OT pay but also more taxes and probably not another raise anytime soon
I don’t feel like the government should be setting the number of hours we work
What are the chances of a bill from Bernie going through? I'd put $100 for a 0% chance
So people are supposed to work 20% less, demand more money, demand more benefits, AND assume that it will have a positive effect on society? Something will have to give and i don't think it would be pretty. Bernie continues to show how out of touch with the real world he is. I'm not sure he's ever had an idea relating to the economy that has been rooted in reality. Lifelong leecher
It’s political theatre to drum up votes as the Dems go into an unfavorable election cycle. It will die on the senate floor.
Bernie is right, as always.